Mary, with no diadem, no jewelled band, not a bracelet or a gem, her head simply crowned by a few golden rays, is seen in a white dress, closed to the throat, and a blue cloak of which the ample folds lie on the ground; the sleeves of her under dress, fastened at the wrists, are of a rich blue violet, more nearly black than red.

Her face is indescribable; of superhuman loveliness, with long red-gold hair; the brow high, the nose straight, the lips full, the chin small; but words are of no avail; what cannot be described is the expression of candour and sadness, the tide of love that rises to those downcast eyes as she looks down on the tiny, helpless Babe, round whose head there is a rosy nimbus starred with gold.

Never was there a more unearthly and yet more living Virgin. Neither Van Eyck, with his rather vulgar and never beautiful heads, nor Memling—more tender and refined, no doubt, but limited to his ideal of a woman with a round forehead and a face shaped like a kite, wide above and pointed below—ever achieved the elegance of form or the purity of a woman made divine by love, a being who, even apart from her surroundings and bereft of the attributes by which she is recognizable, could be none other than the Mother of God.

By her side the Chevalier Bladelin, dressed all in black, with his equine type of face, his shaven cheeks, his dignity, at once priestly and princely, is lost in contemplation, far away from the world; he is praying in good earnest. And Saint Joseph, opposite to him, represented as a bald old man, with a short beard, and wearing a red cloak, comes forward as if amazed at his happiness, and scarce daring to believe that the moment has come when he may adore the Messiah born at last; he smiles, deferentially, mildly stepping with the almost clumsy care of an old man who would fain be serviceable but fears to intrude.

To make the whole thing more than perfect, above the figure of Pierre Bladelin extends a wondrous landscape, cut across by the High Street of Middelburg, the town founded by this nobleman, a street bordered by castellated houses with battlements and church towers, and vanishing in a country scene lighted up by a clear sky, a blue spring day; above Saint Joseph a meadow and woods, sheep and shepherds, and three exquisite angels in robes, one of pinkish yellow, one of purple like a campanula, and one of greenish citron hue; three really ethereal beings, having no relationship with the pertly innocent pages invented by the Renaissance.

If we sum up the whole impression produced by this work, we are led to the conclusion that mystical art, still dwelling on earth, and not restricted to scenes in Heaven, as Angelico had chosen to limit it in his "Coronation of the Virgin," has produced in Roger van der Weyden's triptych the purest effluence of prayer to be found in painting. Never has the Nativity been so gloriously set forth, nor, it may be said, more artlessly and simply expressed. The masterpiece of the Christmas festival is at Berlin, just as the masterpiece of the Deposition is at Antwerp, in the agonized and magnificent work of Quentin Matsys.

"The early Flemish painters were the greatest that ever lived!" said Durtal to himself, "and this Roger Van der Weyden, or Roger de la Pasture as he is sometimes called, crushed between the fame of van Eyck and of Memling—as Gherard David was later, and Hugo van der Goes, Justus of Ghent, and Dierck Bouts—was in my opinion superior to them all.

"And after them what a falling away! Theatrical Crucifixions, the fleshy coarseness of Rubens which Vandyck tried to mitigate by making it leaner. We must leap into Holland to find the mystic accent once more, and it reveals itself in the soul of a Judaizing Protestant, under an aspect so mysterious and eccentric that at first sight we hesitate, feeling ourselves, as it were, to make sure that we are not mistaken in regarding this as religious art.

"Nor need we go to Amsterdam to verify the truth of this impression. It is enough to go to see the 'Disciples at Emmaus,' in the Louvre."

Durtal, started on this theme, fell into a reverie over Rembrandt's strange conception of Christian aesthetics. It is evident that in his mode of depicting Gospel scenes this painter still exhales a breath of the Old Testament; his church, even if he had meant to paint it as it was in his day, would still be a synagogue, so strong is the odour of the Jew in all his work; he is possessed by the imagery, the prophecies, all the solemn and barbarous side of the East. And this we can understand when we know that he was the companion of Rabbis, whose portraits he has left us, and the friend of Manasseh ben Israel, one of the most learned men of his age. On the other hand, we may admit that this Protestant Dutchman engrafted on this stock of cabalistic learning and Mosaic ceremonial an attentive and assiduous study of the Old Testament, for he possessed a Bible, which was sold by auction with his furniture to pay his debts.

This would be enough to justify his choice of subjects and the composition of his pictures; but the riddle remains unsolved of the results achieved by an artist whom we cannot conceive of, after all, as praying before he would paint: like Angelico and Roger van der Weyden.

Be this as it may, he, with the eye of a visionary, with his serious but fervid art, his genius for concentration, for getting a spot of the essence of sunlight into the heart of darkness, has accomplished great results; and in his Biblical scenes has spoken a language which no one before him had even attempted to lisp.

Is not this picture of the Pilgrims to Emmaus a typical instance of this? Pull the work to pieces; it ought to seem dull, monotonous, voiceless. As a composition it is utterly common: we see a sort of cellar of stone-work, a table facing us, behind which sits Jesus, His feet bare, His lips colourless, His complexion muddy, His raiment of a pinkish grey; He is breaking the bread, while, to His right, an apostle, clutching his napkin, looks at Him, fancies he recognizes Him, and on the left another disciple, quite sure that he knows Him, clasps his hands—and this one utters a cry of joy that we can hear! A fourth figure, with an intelligent profile, sees nothing, but, attentive to his duties, waits on the guests.

It is a meal of humble folk in a prison; the colours are limited to a key of sad greys and browns, excepting in the case of the man who twists his napkin, whose sleeves are thick with a vermilion like red sealing-wax, while the others might be painted with dust and pitch.

These are the literal facts; but they are not the truth, for everything is transfigured. The head of Christ is luminous merely by the way He looks up; a pale radiance fills the room. This Jesus, ugly as He is, with lips like death, asserts Himself by a gesture, a look of ineffable beauty, as the murdered Son of a God!

We stand dumfounded, not even trying to understand; for this work, stamped with transcendent naturalism, is beyond and apart from painting; no one can copy or reproduce it.

"After Rembrandt," Durtal went on, "there is an irremediable decay of religious feeling in painting. The seventeenth century has not left a single picture in which there is a genuine stamp of manly devotion; excepting, indeed, in Spain at the time when Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross flourished there; then the mystical realism of its painters produced some fiercely fervid works;" and Durtal recalled a picture by Zurbaran he had seen and admired in the Gallery at Lyons, Saint Francis of Assisi standing upright in a habit of grey serge, the cowl over his head, his hands hidden in his sleeves.

The face looked as if it had been moulded or chiselled out of cinders; the mouth was open, livid, below ecstatic eyes as white as if they had been blinded. It was a wonder how this corpse, of which nothing was left but the bones, could hold itself up; and terror came over the beholder as he thought of the excessive maceration and overwhelming penances that must have exhausted that frame and seamed that face.

This painting was the evident outcome of the relentless and terrible mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, the art of the rack, the delirium tremens of divine intoxication here on earth; aye, but what a passion of adoration, what a voice of love stifled by anguish found utterance in this canvas.

As to the eighteenth century, it was not worth a thought; that century was the age of the belly and the bath-room; as soon as art tried to touch the Church it only made a washing-basin into a holy-water stoup.

In our own time, again, there is nothing to note.

Overbeck, Ingres, Flandrin—all sorry jades harnessed willy-nilly to religious tasks by commissions from the pious. In the church of Saint Sulpice Delacroix extinguishes all the feeble art that surrounds him, but his sense of Catholic art is null.

In truth, faith is now dormant, and without that no mystical work is possible!

At the present moment Signol is dead, but Olivier Merson is left; vacuity all along the line. We need not take into account the got-up absurdities and paintings to puzzle Rosicrucian simpletons; nor, again, the feeble imagery of the wealthy idlers or the worthy youths who fancy that if they paint a woman larger than life, that makes her mystical. Silence would befit the subject, only that, unluckily, a well-meaning publisher was struck by the idea of mobilizing the clerical forces to hail James Tissot as an evangelical painter. His Life of Christ is one of the least religious works conceivable, for, in fact, it might be regarded as a hesitating paraphrase of the Life of Jesus as narrated by that cheerful apostate and terrible jester, Renan.

The firm of Mame has completed this artist's treason by the issue of these melancholy chromo-lithographs. Under the pretext of realism, of information acquired on the spot, of authenticated costumes—all extremely doubtful, since we should be forced to conclude that nothing has changed in Palestine in the course of nineteen centuries—Monsieur Tissot has given us the basest masquerade that anyone has yet dared present as an illustration of the Scriptures. Look at that disreputable trull, a street slut tired of shouting "This way to the boats!" till she falls fainting. This is the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin. That epileptic boy with outstretched arms is Jesus in the Temple. Look at the Baptism, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Saint Peter walking on the Sea, the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus, the ridiculous Consummatum est—look at them all: these prints are matchless for platitude, effeteness, poverty of spirit. They might have been designed by the first-comer, and are painted with muck, wine-sauce, mud!

Certainly the hapless Catholics have no luck when once they try to meddle with what they do not understand; their incurable lack of artistic sense is once more displayed in this attempt over which the whole world of art and letters is laughing in their sleeve.

"Then is there nothing, absolutely nothing, to the credit side for the Church?" exclaimed Durtal. "And yet some attempts at ascetic art have been made in this century. A few years since, the Benedictine House at Beuron, in Bavaria, tried to revive ecclesiastical art"; and Durtal remembered having looked through some reproductions of mural frescoes painted by these monks in a tower at Monte Cassino.

These frescoes had gone back to the types of Assyria and Egypt, with their crowned gods, their sphynx-headed angels having fan-shaped wings behind their heads, their old men with plaited beards playing on stringed instruments; and then the Friars of Beuron had given up this hieratic style, in which, it must be owned, they succeeded but ill, and in certain later works—especially in a volume of the Way of the Cross, published at Freiburg in Breisgau—they had adopted a strange medley of other styles.

The Roman soldiers who figured in those pages were huge firemen, a bequest from the schools of Guerin and David; and then, unexpectedly, in certain plates where the Magdalen and the Holy women appeared, a younger spirit seemed to prevail among the commonplace groups—Greek female types derived from the Renaissance, pretty and elegant, evidently imported from the works of the pre-Raphaelites, and strongly recalling Walter Crane's illustrations.

Thus the ideal at Beuron had developed into an alloy of the French art of the First Empire and contemporary English work.

Some of these compositions were all but laughable, that of the Ninth Station, to mention one: Christ lying at full length on His face, and being pulled up by a rope tied to His bound hands; it looked as if He were learning to swim. Still, but for feeble and vulgar incidents, clumsy and obvious details, what strange scenes suddenly rose before his mind, distinct from the mass: Veronica on her knees before Jesus, was really distracted with grief, really fine; the borrowed or copied figures of the other persons represented disappeared; even in the least original of these compositions the coarse, unsatisfactory utterances of these monks spoke an almost eloquent language; and this because intense faith and fervour lurked in the work. A breath had passed over those faces, and they were alive; the emotion, the voice of prayer, was felt in the silence of this conventional crowd. This Way of the Cross was matchless from this point of view: Monastic piety had introduced an unexpected element, giving evidence of the mysterious power it has at its command, infusing a personal emotion, a peculiar aroma, into a work which, without it, would never indeed have existed. These Benedictines had suggested the sensation of kneeling worship and the very fragrance of the Gospel, as artists of wider scope had failed in doing.

Their attempt, however, had begotten no following, and at this day the school is almost dead, producing nothing but feeble prints for old women designed by the lay-brothers.

How, indeed, could it have been anything but still-born? The idea of doing for the West what Manuel Pauselinos did for the East, of eliminating study from nature, imposing an uniform ritual of colour and line, of compelling every artistic temperament to squeeze itself into the same mould, shows an absolute misapprehension of art in the mind of the man who attempted it. The system was bound to end in ankylosis, in the paralysis of painting, and this, in fact, was the result.

At about the same time with these Religious an unknown artist, living in the country, and never exhibiting in Paris, was painting pictures for churches and convents, working for the glory of God and refusing all remuneration from priests or monks. Durtal knew his pictures, and they had suggested much the same reflections as those aroused by the Benedictine paintings of Beuron.

At first sight Paul Borel's work is neither cheerful nor attractive; the phrases he used might often have made a partisan of the modern smile; and besides, to judge his work fairly it is indispensable to get rid of part of it, to refuse to see anything but that which has evaded the too-familiar formulas of commonplace unction; and then what a spirit of manly fervency, of ardent piety, filled and upheld it.

His most important paintings are buried in the chapel of the Dominican school at Oullins, in a remote corner of the suburbs of Lyons. Among the ten subjects that decorate the nave, we find Moses Striking the Rock, the Disciples at Emmaus, the Healing of One Possessed, of One Born Blind, and of Tobit; but in spite of the calm energy shown in these frescoes, they are disappointing by reason of their general heaviness and of the sleepy and unwonted effect of colour. Not till we reach the choir, beyond the communion railing, do we find works of a quite different kind of art, above some magnificent figures of saints of the Order of Friars Preacher, amazing in the power of prayer, the essence of saintliness that they diffuse.

There, too, Durtal had found two large compositions: one of the Virgin bestowing the Rosary on Saint Dominic, and the other of Saint Thomas Aquinas kneeling before an altar on which stands a Crucifix radiating light. Never since the Middle Ages had monks been so understood and so painted; never had a more impetuous fount of soul been revealed under so stern a casing of features. Borel was the painter of the Monastic Saints; his art, by nature rather torpid, soared up with them as soon as he tried to paint them.

At Versailles, again, even better perhaps than in the chapel of the Oullins seminary, the sincere and deeply religious work of Borel might be studied. At the entrance to the chapel of the Augustine Sisters in that town, of which Borel had painted the nave and the choir, there stood a figure of an Abbess of the fourteenth century, Saint Clare of Montefalcone, in the black robes of an Augustinian Nun, against the stone walls of her cell, an open book on one side of the figure and a brass lamp on the other, somewhat behind her on a table.

In that face, bent over the Crucifix she was pressing to her lips, in that countenance, at once sweet and hungering, in the movement of the arms closely folded over her bosom, raised to her face, and themselves forming a cross, he had seen the complete absorption of a bride, the rapt, ecstatic joy of the purest love, and at the same time something of the anxious affection of a mother cherishing the Christ she kissed, and seemed to shelter in her bosom like a suffering child.

And this was all set forth without any theatrical attitude or forced gestures, with perfect simplicity. This Saint Clare has no ravings, no outcries, like Saint Magdalen of Pazzi; she does not soar with the flight of divine intoxication. The mystic possession manifests itself in a mute rapture; her transports are controlled, and her inebriety is grave; she does not diffuse herself, but opens her soul, and Jesus, as He enters in, stamps her with His likeness, impresses her with the image of the Crucifix she holds, and of which the impress was found graven on her heart when it was examined after her death.

This was the most remarkable religious painting of our time, and it was achieved with no borrowing from the Early painters, no trickery of awkward attitudes supported by iron bars, no affectations, no artifice. And what a devout Catholic, what an emotionally pious artist must the man be who could produce such a work!

After him the rest was silence. Among the religious youth of to-day no one is to be found equal to the presentment of Church subjects. "Only one," said Durtal, thinking it over, "gave any hope of such powers, for he stands apart from the rest, and, at any rate, has talent."

He rose and went to turn over his portfolios, picking out the lithographs by Charles Dulac.

This artist had begun with a series of landscapes, idealizing nature, at first with a timid hand—extravagantly large pools, and trees with leaves that looked like wild wigs tossed by the wind; then he had produced a rendering in black and white of a Canticle of the Sun, or of Creation, and had poured out in nine plates, printed in different states of tone, that effluence of mystical feeling which in his first set was still latent and undecided.

The rather hackneyed dictum that "a landscape is a state of mind," was strictly appropriate to this work; the artist had stamped his faith on these views, studied, no doubt, from nature, but seen, it was evident, not by the eyes alone, but by a captivated spirit singing in the open air Daniel's hymn and David's psalm, as interpreted by Saint Francis, and repeating after them the thought that all the Elements shall sing to the glory of Him who created them.

Among these plates two were genuinely inspiring: that with the title, Stella Matutina, and the other with the words, Spiritus Sancte Deus; but another, the broadest, the most decisive, and the simplest of them all, bearing the title Sol Justitiae, seemed best of all to set forth the individual sympathies of the artist.

It was thus composed: A light, remote, translucent distance was lost in infinitude—a peninsula, a desert waste of waters with ribs of shore, tongues of land planted with trees repeated in the mirror of the lake; on the horizon the sun, half set, cast its beams reflected by the sheet of waters; that was all, but amazing placidity and calm, a sense of fulness was shed over all. The idea of justice, to which that of mercy answers as its inevitable echo, was symbolized in the serene solemnity of this expanse lighted up by the glow of a kindly season and mild atmosphere.

Durtal drew back to get a more complete view of the work as a whole.

"There is no denying it," said he; "this artist has the instinct, the subtle sense of aerial space, of expanse; he understands the soul of calm waters flowing under a vast sky! And then, this print diffuses emanations as from a Catholic, which steal into us, slowly soak into our heart.

"And by this time," said he, closing the portfolio, "I am far enough away from the original matter, and none the nearer to any article I can write for the Review. A paper on the primitive German painters would, indeed, be quite in its line; yes, but what an undertaking! I should have to work up my notes, and after dealing with Meister Wilhelm, Stephan Lochner, and Zeitblom, to speak of Bernhardt Strigel, an almost unknown painter, of Albert Duerer, Holbein, Martin Schongauer, Hans Balding, Burgkmayer, and I know not how many more. I should have to account for whatever may have survived of orthodoxy in Germany after the Reformation; to mention, at any rate, from the Lutheran point of view, that extraordinary painter, Cranach, whose Adams are bearded Apollos of the complexion of a Red Indian, and his Eves slender, chubby-faced courtesans, with bullet heads, little shrimps' eyes, lips moulded out of red pomatum, breasts like apples close under the neck, long, slim legs, elegantly formed, with the calf high up, and large, flat feet with thick ankles.

"Such a treatise would carry me too far. It is amusing to dream over, but not to write. I should do better to seek a less panoramic, a compacter subject. But what?—Well, I will see later," he concluded, getting up, for Madame Mesurat jovially announced that dinner was ready.



CHAPTER XIII.

To change his weariness of the place, Durtal one sunny afternoon went to the further end of Chartres, to visit the ancient church of Saint Martin du Val. It dated from the tenth century, and had served as the chapel by turns of a Benedictine House and of a Capuchin convent. Restored without any too flagrant heresies, it was now included in the precincts of an Asylum, and was reached by crossing a yard where blind folk in white cotton caps sat nodding on benches in the shade of a few trees.

Its small, squat doorway and three little belfries, as if it had been built for a village of dwarfs, attested its Romanesque origin; and, as at Saint Radegonde at Poitiers and Notre Dame de la Couture at le Mans, the interior opened, under an altar very much raised above the ground, into a crypt lighted by loopholes borrowing their light from the ambulatory of the choir. The capitals of the columns, coarsely carved, resembled the idols of Oceania; under the pavement and in the tombs lay many of the Bishops of Chartres, and newly-consecrated prelates were supposed to spend the first night of their arrival at the See in prayer before these tombs, so as to imbue themselves with the virtues of their predecessors and enlist their support.

"The Manes of these Bishops might very well have whispered to their present successor, Monseigneur des Mofflaines, some plan for purifying the House of the Virgin by turning out the vile musician who degrades the Sanctuary on Sundays to the level of a music hall!" sighed Durtal. 'But, alas! nothing disturbs the inertia of that aged, and invalid shepherd, who is, indeed, never to be seen either in his garden, in the cathedral, or in the town.

"Ah! But this is something better than all the vocal flourishes of the choristers!" said Durtal to himself as he listened to the bells aroused from silence to shed the blessed drops of sound over the city.

He called to mind the meanings ascribed to bells by the early symbolists. Durand of Mende compares the hardness of the metal to the power of the preacher, and thinks that the blows of the tongue against the side, aim at showing the orator that he should punish himself and correct his own vices before he blames those of others. The wooden crossbeam to which the bell is suspended resembles in form the Cross of Christ, and the rope pulled by the ringer to set the bell going is allegorical of the knowledge of the Scripture which depends on the Cross itself.

According to Hugh of Saint Victor, the tongue of the bell is the sacerdotal tongue, which, striking on both sides of the body, declares the truth of both Testaments. Finally, to others the bell itself is the mouth of the Liturgy, and the tongue its tongue.

"In fact, the bell is the Church's herald, its outer voice, as the priest is its inward voice," Durtal concluded.

While meditating in this wise, he had reached the cathedral, and for the hundredth time stood to admire those powerful abutments throwing out, with the strong curve of a projectile, flying buttresses like spoked wheels, and, as usual, he was amazed by the flight of the parabola, the grace of the trajectory, the sober strength of those curved supports. "Still," said he to himself, as he studied the parapet raised above them, bordering the roof of the nave, "the architect who was content to stamp out those trefoil arches, as if they were punched in that stone parapet, was less happily inspired than certain other master-masons or stone-workers who enclosed the little gutter-path they made round church roofs with scriptural or symbolical images. Such an one was he who built the cathedral at Troyes, where the top parapet is carved alternately into fleur de lys and Saint Peter's keys; and he who at Caudebec sculptured the edge into gothic letters of a delightfully decorative character, spelling a hymn to the Virgin, thus crowning the church with a garland of prayer, wreathing its head with a white chaplet of aspiration."

Durtal left the north side of the cathedral, went past the royal door and round the corner of the old tower. With one hand he held on his hat, and with the other grasped the skirts of his coat, which flapped about his legs. The storm blew permanently on this spot. There might be not a breath of air anywhere else in the town, but here, at this corner, winter and summer, there was always a blast that caught cloaks and skirts and lashed the face with icy thongs.

"That perhaps is the reason why the statues of the neighbouring north door, which are so incessantly scourged by the wind, stand in such shivering attitudes with narrow and tightly-drawn raiment, their arms and legs held close," thought Durtal, with a smile. "And is it not the same with that strange figure dwelling in companionship with a sow spinning—though it is not in fact a sow, but a hog—and an ass playing on a hurdy-gurdy on the storm-beaten wall of the old tower?"

These two animals, whose careless herd he seems to be, represent in their merry guise the old popular sayings: Ne sus Minerveum, and Asinus ad lyram, which may be freely rendered by "Every man to his trade," and "Never force a talent;" for we should but be as inept as a pig trying to be wise or an ass trying to strike the lyre.

But this angel with a nimbus, standing barefoot under a canopy, supporting a sun-dial against his breast, what does he mean, what is he doing?

A descendant of the royal women of the north porch, for he is like them in his slender shape, sheathed in a clinging robe with string-like pleats, he looks over our heads, and we wonder whether he is very impure or very chaste.

The upper part of the face is innocent, the hair cropped round the head; the face is beardless and the expression monastic, but between the nose and mouth there is a broad slope, and the lips, parting in a straight gash, wear a smile, which as we look seems just a little impudent, just a little vulgar, and we wonder what manner of angel this may be.

There is in this figure something of the recalcitrant seminarist, and also something of the virtuous postulant. If the sculptor took a young Brother for his model, he certainly did not choose a docile novice, such as he who no doubt served for the study of Joseph standing under the north door; he must have worked from one of the religious Gyrovagoi who so tormented St. Benedict. A strange figure is this angel, who has a father at Laon, behind the cathedral, and who anticipated by many centuries the puzzling seraphic types of the Renaissance.

"What a wind!" muttered Durtal, hastening back to the west front, where he went up the steps and pushed the door open.

The entrance to this immense and obscure church is always coercive; we instinctively bend the head and advance cautiously under the oppressive majesty of its vault. Durtal stopped when he had gone a few steps, dazzled by the illumination of the choir in contrast with the dark alley of the nave, which only gained a little light where it joined the transepts. The Christ had the legs and feet in shadow, the body in subdued light, and the head bathed in a torrent of glory; Durtal gazed up in the air at the motionless ranks of Patriarchs, and Apostles, and Bishops, and Saints in a glow as of dying fires, dimly lighted glass, guarding the Sacred Body at their feet, below them; they stood in rows along the upper storey in huge pointed settings, with wheels above them, showing to Jesus, nailed to earth, His army of faithful soldiers, His legions as enumerated in the Scriptures, the Legends, the Martyrology; Durtal could identify in the armed throng of the painted windows St. Laurence, St. Stephen, St. Giles, St. Nicholas of Myra, St. Martin, St. George of Cappadocia, St. Symphorian, St. Philip, St. Foix, St. Laumer, and how many more whose names he could not recollect—and paused in admiration near the transept, in front of a figure of Abraham fixed for ever in a threatening gesture, holding a sword over a crouching Isaac, the blade shining brightly against the infinite blue.

He stood admiring the conceptions and the craftsmanship of those thirteenth century glass-workers, their emphatic language, necessary at such great heights, the way in which they had made the pictures legible from a distance by introducing a single figure in each, whenever that was possible, and painting it in massive outline, with contrasting colours, so as to be easily taken in at a glance when seen from below.

But the triumph of this art was neither in the choir, nor in the transepts of the church, nor in the nave; it was at the entrance, on the inner side of the wall, where on the outside stood the statues of the nameless queens. Durtal delighted in this glorious show, but he always postponed it a little to excite himself by expectancy, and revel in the leap of joy it gave him, repetition of the sensation not having yet availed to weaken it.

On this particular day, under a sunny sky, these three windows of the twelfth century blazed with splendour with their broad short blades, the blade of a claymore, flat wide panels of glass under the rose that held the most prominent place over the west door.

It was a twinkling sheet of cornflowers and sparks, a shifting maze of blue flames—a paler blue than that in which Abraham, at the end of the nave, brandished his knife; this pale, limpid blue resembled the flames of burning punch and of the ignited powder of sulphur, and the lightning flash of sapphires, but of quite young sapphires, as it were, still infantine and tremulous. And in the right hand pointed window he could distinguish in burning red the Stem of Jesse—figures piled up espalier fashion, in the blue fire of the sky; while to the left and in the middle, scenes were shown from the Life of Jesus—the Annunciation, Palm Sunday, the Transfiguration, the Last Supper, and the Supper at Emmaus; and above these three windows Christ hurled thunder from the heart of the great rose, the dead emerged from their graves at the trumpet-call, and St. Michael weighed souls.

"How did the glass-makers discover and compound that twelfth century blue?" wondered Durtal. "And why have their successors so long lost it, as well as their red?

"In the twelfth century glass-painters made use chiefly of three colours; first, blue—that ineffable, uncertain sky-blue which is the glory of the Chartres windows; then red—a purplish red, full and important; and green—inferior in quality to the two others. For white they preferred a greenish tinge.

"In the following century the palette is more extensive, but the stain is darker; the glass, too, is thicker. And yet, what a glowing blue of pure, bold sapphire tone the artists of the furnace had at their command, and what a fine red they used, the colour of fresh blood! Yellow, of which they were less lavish, was, if I may judge from the robe of a king near the Abraham, in a window by the transept, a daring hue of bright lemon. But apart from these three colours, which have a sort of resonance, and burst forth like songs of joy in these transparent pictures, others grow more sober; the violets are like Orleans plums or purple egg-fruit, the browns are of the hue of burnt sugar, the chive-coloured greens turn dark.

"But what masterpieces of colour they achieved by the harmony and contrast of these tones, and with what skill did they handle the lead-lines, emphasizing certain details, punctuating and dividing these paragraphs of flame as if with lines of ink.

"And another thing which is amazing is the perfect agreement of all these various crafts, practised side by side, treating the same subjects, or supplementing each other—each, by its own mode of expression, under one guiding mind, contributing to the whole; with what a sense of fitness, with what skill were the posts distributed, the places assigned to each as beseemed the purpose of his craft, the requirements of his art.

"Architecture having finished the lower portion of the edifice, retires into the background to make way for Sculpture, giving it the fine opportunity of the doorways; and Sculpture, hitherto invisible at excessive heights, as a mere accessory, suddenly finds itself supreme. With due sense of justice it now comes forward where it can be seen, and the sister art retires, leaving it to address the multitude, giving it the noblest framework in those arched doorways, imitating a deeper perspective by their concentric arches, diminishing and retreating to the door-frames.

"In other instances Architecture does not give everything to one art, but divides the bounty of her great facade between sculpture and painting; reserving to the former the hollows and nooks where statues may find niches, and giving to glass-painters the tympanum of the great door, where at Chartres the image-maker has displayed the Triumph of Christ. This we see in the great west doors of Tours and of Reims.

"This plan of substituting glass for bas-reliefs had its disadvantages; seen from outside—their wrong side—these diaphanous pictures look like spiders' nets on an enormous scale and thick with dust. With the light on them the windows are, in fact, grey or black; it is only by going inside and looking back that their fire can be seen flashing; the outside is here sacrificed to the inside. Why?

"Perhaps," said Durtal, answering himself, "it is symbolical of the soul having light inwardly, an allegory of the spiritual life—"

He took in all the windows of the nave with a rapid glance, and it struck him that their effect was a combination of the prison and the grave, with their coals of fire burning behind iron bars, some crossed like the windows of a gaol, and others twisting like black twigs and branches. Is not glass painting of all arts that in which God does most to help the artist, the art which man, unaided, can never make perfect, since the sky alone can give life to the colours by a beam of sunshine, and lend movement to the lines? In short, man fashions the form, prepares the body, and must wait till God infuses the soul.

"It is to-day a high-day of light and the Sun of Justice is visiting His Mother," he went on, as he walked to where the pillared thicket of the choir ended at the south transept, to look at the window known as Notre Dame de la belle Verriere, the figure, in blue, relieved against a mingled background of dead-leaf olive, brown, iris violet, plum-green; She gazed out with her sad and pensive pout—a pout very cleverly restored by a modern glass-painter; and Durtal remembered that people had come to pray to Her, as he now went to pray to the Virgin of the Pillar and Notre Dame de Sous Terre.

Such devotion was a thing of the past; the men of our time need, it would seem, a more tangible, a more material Virgin than this slender, fragile image, hardly visible in dark weather; nevertheless, a few peasants still kept up the habit of kneeling and offering a taper before Her, and Durtal, who loved these old neglected Madonnas, joined them and invoked Her too.

Two other windows also appealed to him by the singularity of the figures, perched very high up, in the depths of the apse, and serving as attendant pages, at a distance, to the Virgin holding Her Son in the centre light commanding the whole perspective of the cathedral; these each contained in a light-toned lancet, a barbarous and grotesque seraph, with sharply-marked features, white wings full of eyes, and robes with jagged, strap-like edges of a pale green colour; their legs were bare, and they were represented as floating. These two angels had jujube yellow aureoles tilted to the back like sailors' hats; and this ragged attire, the feathers folded over the breast, the hat of glory, with their general expression of refractory wilfulness, suggested the idea that these beings were at once paupers, Apaches or Mohicans, and seamen.

As to the remaining windows, especially those which included several figures and were divided into several pictures, it would have needed a telescope and have taken many days of study only to make out the story they told, and discover the details; and months would not have sufficed for the task, since the glass had been in many cases repaired and often replaced without regard to order, so that it was especially difficult to decipher it.

An attempt had been made to count the number of figures represented in the cathedral windows; they were as many as 3889; in the mediaeval times everybody had been eager to present a glass picture to the Virgin. Not cardinals only, kings, bishops and princes, canons and nobles, but the corporations of the town also had contributed these panels of fire; the richest, such as the Guilds of Drapers and Furriers, of Goldsmiths and Money-changers, had each presented five to Our Lady, while the poorer companies of the Master Scavengers and Water-carriers, the Porters and Rag-pickers, each gave one.

Pondering on these things, Durtal wandered round the ambulatory and paused in front of a small stone Virgin ensconced at the foot of the stairs leading up to the chapel of Saint Piat, constructed in the fourteenth century as a sort of outbuilding behind the apse. This Virgin, dating from the same period, had shrunk into the shade, effacing Herself, deferentially leaving the more important places to the senior Madonnas.

She carried an Infant playing with a bird, in allusion, no doubt, to the passage in the apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy, and of Thomas the Israelite, which shows us the Child Jesus amusing Himself by modelling birds out of clay, and giving them life by breathing upon them.

Then Durtal continued his walk through the chapels; stopping only to look at one which contained relics of opposite utility and double purpose: the shrines of Saint Piat and Saint Taurinus. The bones of the former saint were displayed to secure dry weather in times of rain, and those of the second to invoke rain in times of drought. But what was far less comforting and more irritating even than this array of side-chapels, with their wretched adornment—with names that had been changed since their first dedication so that the tutelary protection earned by centuries of service had ceased to exist—was the choir, battered, dirty, degraded as if on purpose.

In 1763 the old Chapter had thought fit to deface the Gothic columns, and to have them colour-washed by a Milanese lime-washer, of a yellowish pink speckled with grey; then they had abandoned to the town-museum some magnificent pieces of Flemish tapestry that screened the inner circuit of the choir aisles, and had put in their place bas-reliefs in marble executed by the dreadful bungler who had crushed the altar under the gigantic group of the Virgin. And mischance had helped. In 1789 the Sansculottes were intending to destroy this mountainous Assumption, and some ill-starred idiot saved it by placing a cap of liberty on the Virgin's head!

To think that some beautiful windows were knocked out in order to get a better light for this mass of lard! If only there were the slightest hope of ever getting rid of it; but alas! all such hopes are vain. Some years ago, when Monseigneur Regnault was Bishop, the idea was indeed suggested—not of making away with this petrified lump of tallow, but at least of getting rid of the bas-reliefs.

Then the prelate—who stuffed his ears with cotton for fear of taking cold—set his face against it; and for reasons of equal importance, no doubt, the sacrilegious hideousness of this Assumption must be for ever endured, and the marble screens as well.

But though the interior of this choir was a disgrace, the groups round the ambulatory of the apse and the outer wall of the choir were well worth lingering over.

These figures under canopies and tabernacles carved by Jehan de Beauce began on the right by the south transept, went round the horse-shoe behind the altar, and ended at the north transept where the Black Virgin of the Pillar stands.

The subjects were the same as those treated in the small capitals of the royal doorway, outside the church, above the panegyric of the kings, saints, and queens. They were taken from the Apocryphal legends, the Gospel of the Childhood of Mary, and the Protoevangelist James the Less.

The first of these groups was executed by an artist named Jehan Soulas. The contract, dated January 2nd, 1518, between this sculptor and the delegates of the authorities conducting the works of the church, still existed. It set forth that Jehan Soulas, a master image-maker, dwelling in Paris at the cemetery of Saint Jehan in the parish of Saint Jehan en Greve, pledged himself to execute in good stone of the Tonnerre quarry, and better than the images that are round about the choir of Notre Dame de Paris, the four first groups, of which the subjects were prescribed and explained; in consideration of the sum of two hundred and eighty livres Tournois, which the Chapter of Chartres undertook to pay him as he might require.

Soulas, who had undoubtedly learned his craft from some Flemish artist, produced certain little genre pictures well adapted, by their spirit and liveliness, to cheer the soul that the solemnity of the windows might have depressed; for in this aisle they really seemed to let the light filter through Indian shawl-stuff, admitting only a few dull sparks and smoky gleams.

The second group, representing Saint Anna receiving from an unseen angel an order to go to meet Joachim at the Golden Gate, was a marvel of grace and subtle observation; the saint stood listening attentive in front of her fald-stool, by which lay a little dog; and a waiting-maid, seen in profile, carrying an empty pitcher, smiled with a knowing air and a wink in her eye. And in the next scene, where the husband and wife were embracing each other with the trepidation of a worthy old couple, stammering with joy and clasping trembling hands, the same woman, seen full-face this time, was so delighted at their happiness that she could not keep still, but, holding up her skirts, was almost in the act of dancing.

A little further on, the image-maker had represented the birth of Mary, a thoroughly Flemish scene: in the background, a bed with curtains, on which Saint Anna reclined, watched by a maid, while the midwife and her attendant washed the infant in a basin.

But another of these bas-reliefs, close to the Renaissance clock, which interrupts the series of this history told in the choir-aisle, was even more astonishing. In this Mary was sewing at baby-clothes while reading, and Saint Joseph, asleep in a chair, his head resting on his hand, was instructed in a dream of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. And he not only had his eyes shut, he was sleeping so soundly, so really, that one could see him breathe, one felt his body stretching, relaxing, in the perfect abandonment of his whole being. And how diligently the young mother stitched while she was absorbed in prayers, her nose in her book! Never, certainly, was life more closely apprehended, or expressed with greater certainty and truth to life caught in the act, at the instant, ere it moved.

Next to this domestic scene, and the Adoration of the Shepherds and Angels, came the Circumcision of Jesus, with a white paper apron pasted on by some low jester; then the Adoration of the Magi; and Jehan de Soulas and the pupils of his studio had finished the work on their side. They were succeeded by inferior craftsmen, Francois Marchant of Orleans, and Nicolas Guybert of Chartres; and after them art went on sinking lower and lower, down to one Sieur Boudin, who had dared to sign his miserable puppets, down to the stupid conventionality of Jean de Dieu, Legros, Tuby, and Mazieres, to the cold and pagan work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But there was an improvement in the eight last groups opposite the Virgin of the Pillar—some simple figures carved by the pupils of Soulas; these, however, were to some extent wasted, since they stood in the shadow, and it was almost impossible to judge of them in that half-dead light.

In reviewing this ambulatory, in parts so pleasing and in others so unseemly, Durtal could not help recalling the details of a similar but more complete work—one that had not been wrought in succeeding ages and disfigured by discrepancies of talent and date. This work was at Amiens, and it, likewise, was the decoration of the outer aisle of a cathedral choir.

This story of the life of Saint Firmin, the first Bishop and patron saint of the city, and of the discovery and translation of his relics by Saint Salvo, was told in a series of groups that had been gilt and painted; then, to complete the circuit of the sanctuary, the life of the second patron of Amiens had been added, Saint John the Baptist; and in the scene of the Baptism of Christ a fair-haired angel was represented holding a napkin, an ingenuous and arch being, one of the most adorable seraphic faces ever carved or painted by Flemish art in France.

This legend of Saint Firmin was set forth, like that of the Birth of the Virgin at Chartres, in separate chapters of stone, surmounted in the same way with gothic canopies or tabernacles; and in the compartment where Saint Salvo, surrounded by the multitude, discerns the beams which radiate from a cloud to indicate the spot where the lost body of the Martyr had been buried, a man on his knees with clasped hands, seems to pant, uplifted in prayer, burning, projected by the leap of his soul, his face transfigured, turning a mere rustic into a saint in ecstasy, already dwelling in God far above the earth.

This worshipper was the masterpiece of the ambulatory at Amiens, as the sleeping Saint Joseph was of the bas-reliefs at Chartres.

"Take it for all in all," said Durtal to himself, "that work in the Picardy Cathedral is more explicit, more complete, more various, more eloquent even than that of the church in La Beauce. Irrespective of the fact that the unknown image-maker who created it was as highly gifted as Soulas with acute observation, and persuasive and decided simple-mindedness and spirit, he had besides a peculiar and more noble vein of feeling. And then his subjects were not restricted to the presentment of two or three personages; he frequently grouped a swarming crowd, in which each man, woman, or child differed in individual character and feature from every other, and was conspicuously marked by that unlikeness, so clear and living was the realism of each small figure!

"After all," thought Durtal, looking once more at the choir aisles as he turned away, "though Soulas maybe inferior to the sculptor of Amiens, he is none the less a delightful artist and a true master, and his groups may console us for the ignominious work of Bridan and the atrocious decoration of the choir."

He then went to kneel before the Black Virgin, and returning to the North transept near which She stands, he gazed once more in amazement at the incandescent flowers of the windows; again he was captivated and moved by the five pointed windows under the rose, in which, on each side of the Mauresque Saint Anna, stood David and Solomon, a forbidding pair, in a furnace of purple, and Melchizedec and Aaron with tawny complexions and hairy faces, with enormous colourless eyes standing out passionless in a blaze of daylight.

The radiating rose-window above them was not of the vast diameter of those in Notre Dame de Paris, nor of the incomparable elegance of the star-patterned rose at Amiens. It was smaller and heavier, sparkling with flowers like saxifrages of flame, opening in the pierced wall.

Durtal turned on his heel to look at the South transept, where five great windows faced those on the North. There he saw, blazing like torches on each side of the Virgin placed exactly opposite Saint Anna, the four Evangelists borne on the shoulders of the four greater Prophets—Saint Matthew on Isaiah, Saint Luke on Jeremiah, Saint John on Ezekiel, Saint Mark on Daniel—each stranger than the other, with their eyes like the lenses of opera-glasses, their hair in ripples, their beards like the up-torn roots of trees; excepting Saint John, who was always represented as a beardless youth in the Latin Mediaeval Church, to symbolize his virginity; but the most grotesque of these giants' was perhaps Saint Luke, who, perched on Jeremiah's back, gently scratches the prophet's head, as if he were a parrot, while turning woeful, meditative eyes up to Heaven.

Durtal went down the nave, darker than the choir; the pavement sloped gently to the door, for in the Middle Ages it was washed every morning after the departure of the crowds who slept on it; and he looked down, in the middle, on the labyrinth marked out on the ground in lines of white stone and ribbons of blue stone, twisting in a spiral, like a watch-spring. This path our fathers devoutly paced, repeating special prayers during the hour they spent in doing so, and thus performing an imaginary pilgrimage to the Holy Land to earn indulgences.

When he was out in the square once more, he turned back to take in the splendid effect of the whole before going home.

He felt at once happy and awe-stricken, carried out of himself by the tremendous and yet beautiful aspect of the church.

How grandiose and how aerial was this cathedral, sprung like a jet from the soul of a man who had formed it in his own image, to record his ascent in mystic paths, up and up by degrees in the light; passing through the contemplative life in the transept, soaring in the choir into the full glory of the unitive life, far away now from the purgatorial life, the dark passage of the nave.

And this assumption of a soul was attended, supported, by the bands of angels, the apostles, the prophets, and the righteous, all arrayed in their glorified bodies of flame, an escort of honour to the Cross lying low on the stones, and the image of the Mother enthroned in all the high places of this vast reliquary, opening the walls, as it seemed, to present to Her, as for a perpetual festival, their posies of gems that had blossomed in the fiery heat of the glass windows.

Nowhere else was the Virgin so well cared for, so cherished, so emphatically proclaimed the absolute mistress of the realm thus offered to Her; and one detail proved this. In every other cathedral kings, saints, bishops, and benefactors lay buried in the depths of the soil; not so at Chartres. Not a body had ever been buried there; this church had never been made a sarcophagus, because, as one of its historians—old Rouillard—says, "it has the preeminent distinction of being the couch or bed of the Virgin."

Thus it was Her home; here She was supreme amid the court of Her Elect, watching over the sacramental Body of Her Son in the sanctuary of the inmost chapel, where lamps were ever burning, guarding Him as She had done in His infancy; holding Him on Her knee in every carving, every painted window; seen in every storey of the building, between the ranks of saints, and sitting at last on a pillar, revealing herself to the poof and lowly, under the humble aspect of a sunburnt woman, scorched by the dog-days, tanned by wind and rain. Nay, She went lower still, down to the cellars of Her palace, waiting in the crypt to give audience to the waverers, the timid souls who were abashed by the sunlit splendour of Her Court.

How completely does this sanctuary—where the sweet and awful presence is ever felt of the Child who never leaves His Mother—lift the spirit above all realities, into the secret rapture of pure beauty!

"And how good must They both be," Durtal said to himself, as he looked round and found himself alone, "never to abandon this desert, never to weary of waiting for worshippers! But for the honest country folk who come at all hours to kiss the pillar, what a solitude it would be, even on Sunday, for this cathedral is never full. However, to be just, at the nine o'clock mass on Sundays the lower end of the nave is thronged," and he smiled, remembering that end of the church packed with little girls brought in schools by Sisters, and with peasant women who, not being able to see there to read their prayers, would light ends of taper and crowd together closely, several looking over one book.

This familiarity, this childlike simplicity of piety, which the dreadful sacristans of Paris would never endure in a church, were' so natural at Chartres, so thoroughly in harmony with the homely and unceremonious welcome of Our Lady!

"A thing to be ascertained," said Durtal, starting on a new line of thought, "is whether this church has preserved its surface uninjured, or whether it may not have been coloured in the thirteenth century. Some writers assert that, in Mediaeval times, the interiors of cathedrals were always painted. Is that the fact? Or, admitting that the statement is correct as to all Romanesque churches, is it equally so with regard to Gothic churches?

"For my part, I like to believe that the sanctuary of Chartres was never befooled with gaudiness, such as we have to endure at Saint Germain des Pres, in Paris, and Notre Dame la Grande at Poitiers. In fact such colour can only be conceived of—if at all—as used in small chapels; why stain the walls of a cathedral with motley? For this tattooing, so to speak, reduces the sense of space, brings down the roof, and makes the pillars clumsy; in short, it eliminates the mysterious soul of the nave, and destroys the sober majesty of the aisle with its feebly vulgar fret or guilloche, lozenges or crosses, scattered over the pillars and walls, in a paste of treacly yellow, endive-green, vinous purple, lava drab, brick red—a whole range of dull and dirty colours; to say nothing of the horror of a vault dotted with stars that look as if they had been cut out of gilt paper and stuck against a smalt background, a sky of washing-blue!

"It is endurable—if it must be—in the Sainte-Chapelle, because it is very small, an oratory, a shrine; it might even be intelligible in that wonderful church at Brou, which is a boudoir; its vaulting and pendants are in polychrome and gold, and the ground has been paved with enamelled tiles, of which visible traces remain round the tombs. This gaudiness of the roof and floor was in harmony with the filagree tracery of the walls, the heraldic glass, and the clear windows, the profusion of lace-like carving and coats of arms in the stone-work, blossoming with bunches of daisies mingling with labels, mottoes, monograms, Saint Francis' girdles and knots. The colouring was in keeping with the alabaster retables, the black marble tombs, the pinnacled tabernacles with their crockets of curled and dentate foliage. We can then quite easily imagine the columns and walls painted, the ribs and bosses washed with gold, and making a harmonious whole of this bonbonniere, which indeed is a piece of jewelry rather than of architecture.

"This building at Brou was the last effort of mediaeval times, the last rocket flung up by the flamboyant Gothic style—a Gothic which though fallen from its glory struggled against death, fought against returning paganism and the invading Renaissance. The era of the great cathedrals ended in the production of this exquisite abortion, which was in its way a masterpiece, a gem of prettiness, of ingenuity, of tormented and coquettish taste.

"It was emblematic of the soul of the sixteenth century, already devoid of reserve; the sanctuary, too brightly lighted, was secularized; we here see it fully blown, and it never folded up or veiled itself again. We discern in this a lady's bower, all paint and gold; the little chapels (or pews) with chimney-places where Margaret of Austria could warm herself as she heard Mass, furnished with scented cushions, provided with sweetmeats and toys and dogs.

"Brou is a fine lady's drawing-room, not the house for all comers. Then, naturally, with its screen-work, and the carving of the rood-loft stretching like a lace portal across the entrance to the choir, it invites, it almost requires some skilful tinting of the details, the touches of colour that complete it, and harmonize it finally with the elegance of the founder, the Princess Marguerite, whose presence is far more conspicuous in this little church than is that of the Virgin.

"Even then it would be satisfactory to know whether the walls and pillars at Brou ever were really painted; the contrary seems proven. But in any case, though a touch of rouge might not ill beseem this curious sanctum, it would not be so at Chartres, for the only suitable hue is the shining, greasy patina, grey turning to silver, stone-colour turning buff—the colouring given by age, by time helped by accumulated vapours of prayer and the fumes of incense and tapers!"

And Durtal, arguing over his own reflections, ended by reverting, as he always did, to his own person, saying to himself,—

"Who knows that I may not some day bitterly regret this cathedral and all the sweet meditations it suggests; for, after all, I shall have no more opportunities for such long loitering, such relaxation of mind, since I shall be subject to the discipline of bells ringing for conventual drill if I suffer myself to be locked up in a cloister!

"Who knows whether, in the silence of a cell, I should not miss even the foolish cawing of those black jackdaws that croak without pause," he went on, looking up with a smile at the cloud of birds that settled on the towers; and he recalled a legend which tells that since the fire in 1836 these birds quit the cathedral every evening at the very hour when the conflagration began, and do not return till dawn, after spending the night in a wood at three leagues from Chartres.

This tale is as absurd as another, also dear to the old wives of the city, and which tells that if you spit on a certain square of stone, set with black cement into the pavement behind the choir, blood will exude.

"Hah, it is you, Madame Bavoil."

"Yes, our friend, I myself. I have just been on an errand for the Father, and am going home again to make the soup. And you, are you packing your trunks?"

"My trunks?"

"Why, are not you going off to a convent?" said she, laughing.

"Would not you like to see it?" exclaimed Durtal. "Catch me at that! Enlisting as a private subject to a pious drill, one of a poor squad, whose every movement must mark time, and who, though he is not expected to keep his hands over the seam of his trowsers, is required to hide them under his scapulary—"

"Ta, ta, ta," interrupted the housekeeper, "I tell you once more, you are grudging, bargaining with God—"

"But before coming to so serious a decision it is quite necessary that I should argue all the pros and cons; in such a case some mental litigation is clearly permissible."

She shrugged her shoulders; and there was such peace in her face, such a glow of flame lurked behind the liquid blackness of her eyes, that Durtal stood looking at her, admiring the honesty and purity of a soul which could thus rise to the threshold of her eyes and come forth in her look.

"How happy you are!" he exclaimed.

A cloud dimmed her eyes, and she looked down.

"Envy no one, our friend," said she, "for each has his own struggles and griefs."

And when he had parted from her, Durtal, as he went home, thought of the disasters she had confessed, the cessation of her intercourse with Heaven, the fall of a soul that had been wont to soar above the clouds. How she must suffer!

"No, no," he said, "the service of the Lord is not all roses. If we study the lives of the Saints we see these Elect tormented by dreadful maladies, and the most painful trials. No, holiness on earth is no child's play, life is not amusement. To Saints, indeed, even on earth excessive suffering finds compensation in excessive joys; but to other Christians, such small fry as we are, what distress and trouble! We question the everlasting silence and none answers; we wait and none comes. In vain do we proclaim Him as Illimitable, Incomprehensible, Unthinkable, and confess that every effort of our reason is vain, we cannot cease to wonder, and still less cease to suffer! And yet—and yet if we consider, the darkness about us is not absolutely impenetrable, there is light in places and we can discern some truths, such as this:

"God treats us as He treats plants. He is, in a certain sense, the soul's year; but a year in which the order of the seasons is reversed; for the spiritual seasons begin with spring, followed by winter, and then autumn comes, followed by summer.

"The moment of conversion is the spring, the soul is joyful and Christ sows the good seed; then comes the cold and all is dark, the terror-stricken soul believes itself forsaken and bewails itself; but without its feeling it during the trials of the purgatorial life, the seed germinates in the contemplative peace of autumn and flourishes in the summer life of Union.

"Aye; but each one must be the helping gardener of his own soul, listening to the instructions of the Master who plans the task and directs the work. Alas, we are no more the humble labourers of the Middle Ages, who toiled, giving God thanks, who submitted without discussion to the Master's orders. We, by our little faith, have exhausted the value of prayer, the panacea of aspirations; consequently many things seem to us unjust and cruel, and we rebel, we ask for pledges; we hesitate to begin our task, we want to be paid in advance, and our distrust makes us vile!—O Lord, give us grace to pray, and never dream of demanding an earnest of Thy favours! Give us grace to obey and be silent!

"And I may add," said Durtal to himself as he smiled on Madame Mesurat, who opened the door in answer to his ring, "Grant me, Lord, the grace not to be too much irritated by the buzzing of this great fly, the inexhaustible flow of this good woman's tongue!"



CHAPTER XIV.

"What a fearful muddle, what a sea of ink is this menagerie of good and evil emblems!" exclaimed Durtal, laying down his pen.

He had harnessed himself that morning to the task of investigating the symbolical fauna of the Middle Ages. At first sight the subject had struck him as newer and less arduous, and certainly as less lengthy, than the article he had thought of writing on the Primitive German Painters. But he now sat dismayed before his books and notes, seeking a clue to guide him through the mass of contradictory evidence that lay before him.

"I must take things in their order," said he to himself, "if indeed any principle of selection is possible in such confusion."

The Beast-books of Mediaeval times knew all the monsters of paganism—Satyrs, Fauns, Sphinxes, Harpies, Centaurs, Hydras, Pygmies, and Sirens; these were all regarded as various aspects of the Evil Spirit, so no research is needed as to their meaning; they are but a residuum of Antiquity. The true source of mystic zoology is not in mythology, but in the Bible, which classifies beasts as clean and unclean, makes them symbolize virtues and vices, some species being allegorical of heavenly personages, and other embodying the Devil.

Starting from this base, it may be observed that the liturgical interpreters of the animal world distinguished beasts from animals, including under the former head wild and untamable creatures, and under the second gentle and timid creatures and domestic animals.

The ornithologists of the Church, furthermore, represent birds as being the righteous, while Boetius, on the other hand, often quoted by Mediaeval writers, credited them with inconstancy, and Melito compares them in turn to Christ, to the Devil, and to the Jewish nation. It may be added that Richard of Saint Victor, disregarding these views, sees in winged fowl a symbol of the life of the soul, as in the four-footed beast he sees the life of the body—"And that gets us no further!" sighed Durtal.

"This is beside the mark. We must find some other symbolism, closer and clearer.

"Here the classification of naturalists would be useless, for a biped and a reptile not unfrequently bear the same interpretation as emblems. The simplest plan will be to divide the Church menagerie into two large classes, real beasts and monsters; there is no creature that we may not include in one or the other category."

Durtal paused to reflect:

"Nevertheless to arrive at a clearer notion and better appreciate the importance of certain families in Catholic Mythography, we had better first take out all those animals which symbolize God, the Virgin, and the Devil, setting them aside to be referred to when they may elucidate other figures; and at the same time weed out those which apply to the Evangelists and are combined in the figures of the Tetramorph.

"The surface thus being removed, we may investigate the remainder, the figurative language of ordinary or monstrous beings.

"The animal emblems of God are numerous; the Scriptures are filled with creatures emblematic of the Saviour. David compares Him, by comparing himself, to the pelican in the wilderness, to the owl in its nest, to a sparrow alone on the house-top, to the dove, to a thirsting hart; the Psalms are a treasury of analogies with His qualities and His names.

"Saint Isidor of Seville—Monseigneur Sainct Ysidore, as the naturalists of old are wont to call him—figures Jesus as a lamb by reason of his innocence, as a ram because He is the head of the Flock, even as a he-goat because the Redeemer was subject to the flesh of iniquity.

"Some took as His image the ox, the sheep, and the calf, as beasts meet for sacrifice, and others those animals that symbolize the elements: the lion, the eagle, the dolphin, the salamander—the kings of the earth, air, water, and fire. Some again, as Saint Melito, saw Him in the kid, the deer, and even in the camel, which, however, according to another passage of the same author, personifies a love of flattery and of vain praise. Others again find Him in the scarabaeus, as Saint Euchre does in the bee; still, the bee is regarded by Raban Maur as the unclean sinner. Christ's Resurrection is, to yet other writers, symbolized by the Phoenix and the cock, and His wrath and power by the rhinoceros and the buffalo.

"The iconography of the Virgin is less puzzling; She may be symbolized by any chaste and gentle creature. The Anonymous Englishman in his Monastic Distinctions, compares Her to the bee, which we have seen so vilified by the Archbishop of Mayence, but the Virgin was most especially represented by the dove, the bird of all others whose Church functions are most onerous.

"All authorities agree in taking the dove as the image at once of the Virgin and of the Paraclete. According to Saint Mechtildis, it is the simplicity of the heart of Jesus; with others it signifies the preachers, the active religious life, as contrasted with the turtle dove, which personifies the contemplative life, since the ring-dove flies and coos in company, whereas the turtle dove rejoices apart and alone.

"To Bruno of Asti the dove is also an image of patience, a figure of the prophets.

"As to the beasts symbolizing Hell and evil, they are almost without number; the whole creation of monsters is to be found there. Then among real animals we find: the serpent—the aspic of Scripture, the scorpion, the wolf as mentioned by Jesus Himself, the leopard noted by Saint Melito as being allied to Antichrist, the she-tiger representing the sins of arrogance, the hyena, the jackal, the bear, the wild-boar, which, in the Psalms, is said to destroy the vineyard of the Lord, the fox, described as a hypocritical persecutor by Peter of Capua and as a promoter of heresy by Raban Maur. All beasts of prey; and the hog, the toad—the instrument of witchcraft, the he-goat—the image of Satan himself, the dog, the cat, the ass—under whose form the Devil is seen in trials for witchcraft in the Middle Ages, the leech, on which the anonymous writer of Clairvaux casts contumely; the raven that went forth from the ark and did not return—it represents malice, and the dove which came back is virtue, Saint Ambrose tells us; and the partridge which, according to the same writer, steals and hatches eggs she did not lay.

"If we may believe Saint Theobald, the Devil is also symbolized by the spider, for it dreads the sun as much as the Evil One dreads the Church, and is more apt to weave its net by night than by day, thus imitating Satan, who attacks man when he knows him to be sleeping and powerless to defend himself.

"The Prince of Darkness is also to be seen as the lion and the eagle interpreted in an evil sense.

"This," reflected Durtal, "is the same fact as we find in the expressive symbolism of colours and flowers; constantly a double meaning. The two antagonistic interpretations are almost invariably met with in the lore of hieroglyphics, excepting only in that of gems.

"Thus it is that the lion, defined by Saint Hildegarde as the image of zeal for God, the lion, figuring the Son Himself, becomes to Hugh of Saint Victor the emblem of cruelty. Basing their argument on a text in the Psalms, certain writers identify it with Lucifer. He is in fact the lion who seeks whom he may devour, the lion who rushes on his victim. David speaks of him with the dragon to be trodden under foot, and Saint Peter in his first Epistle describes him as roaring in quest of a Christian to devour.

"It is the same with the eagle, which Hugh of Saint Victor calls the standard of Pride. Chosen by Bruno of Asti, Saint Isidor and Saint Anselm to represent the Saviour, the Fisher of Men, because he pounces from the highest sky on fish swimming on the surface of the water and carries them up, the eagle, classed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy with the unclean beasts, is transformed, as being a bird of prey, into a personification of the Devil snatching away souls to gnaw and tear them.

"Thus every ferocious beast or bird and every reptile is a manifestation of the Evil One," Durtal concluded.

To pass to the Tetramorph. The evangelistic animals are well known:—

Saint Matthew, who expatiates on the subject of the Incarnation and sets forth the human genealogy of the Messiah, is symbolized by a man.

Saint Mark, who more especially devotes his book to the miracles of the Son, saying less about His doctrine than about His acts and His resurrection, has the Lion for his attribute.

Saint Luke, who writes more especially of the virtues of Jesus, of His patience, meekness, and mercy, and who dwells at length on His sacrifice, is distinguished by the Ox or Calf.

Saint John, who preaches above all else the Divinity of the Word, is represented by the Eagle.

And the meaning assigned to the ox, the lion, and the eagle, is in perfect accordance with the character and personal aim of each Gospel.

The lion, emblematical of Omnipotence, is also the apt allegory of the Resurrection. All the primitive naturalists, Saint Epiphanius, Saint Anselm, Saint Yves of Chartres, Saint Bruno of Asti, Saint Isidor, Adamantius, all accept the legend that the lion-cub after its birth remains lifeless for three days; then on the fourth day it awakes as it hears its father's roar and springs full of life out of the den. Thus Christ, rising at the end of three days, escapes from the tomb at the call of His Father.

The belief still prevailed that the lion sleeps with its eyes open; hence it became the emblem of vigilance, and Saint Hilary and Saint Augustine read in this manner of taking repose an allusion to the Divine nature, which was not extinguished even in the sepulchre, though the human nature of the Redeemer was in truth dead.

Finally, as it was considered certain that this animal effaced the traces of its steps in the sand of the desert with its tail, Raban Maur, Saint Epiphanius, and Saint Isidor regarded it as signifying the Saviour veiling His Godhead under the forms of the flesh.

"Not an ordinary beast—the lion!" exclaimed Durtal. "Well," he went on, consulting his notes, "the ox is less pretentious! It is the paragon of strength with humility; according to Saint Paul it is emblematical of the priesthood; of the preacher, according to Raban Maur; of the Bishop, according to Peter Cantor, because, says this writer, the prelate wears a mitre of which the two horns resemble those of an ox, and he uses these horns, which are the wisdom of the Two Testaments, to rip up heretics. Still, in spite of these more or less ingenious interpretations, the ox is in fact the beast of immolation and sacrifice.

"Turning to the eagle, it is, as we have seen, the Messiah pouncing on souls to catch them; but other meanings are ascribed to it by Saint Isidor and by Vincent of Beauvais. If we believe them, the eagle that desires to test the prowess of his eaglets takes them in his talons and carries them out into the sun, compelling them to look with their eyes as they begin to open, on the blazing orb. The eagle which is dazzled by the fire is dropped and cast away by the parent bird. Thus doth God reject the soul which cannot gaze on him with the contemplative eye of love!

"The eagle, again, is typical of the Resurrection; Saint Epiphanius and Saint Isidor explain it thus: The eagle in old age flies up so near to the sun that its feathers catch fire; revived by the flames, it drops into the nearest spring, bathes in it three times and comes out regenerate: is not this indeed the paraphrase of the Psalmist's verse, "Thy youth shall be renewed as the eagle's"? Saint Madalene of Pazzi, however, regards it differently, and takes it to typify faith leaning on charity.

"I shall have to find a place for all these documents in my article," sighed Durtal, placing these notes in a separate wrapper.

Now for the chimerical fauna introduced from the East, imported into Europe by the Crusaders, and travestied by the illuminators of missals and by image-makers.

Foremost, the dragon, which we already find rampant and busy in mythology and in the Bible.

Durtal rose and went into his library to find a book, "Traditions teratologiques," by Berger de Xivrey. It contained long extracts from the "Romance of Alexander," which was the delight of the grown-up children of the Middle Ages.

"Dragons," says this narrative, "are larger than all other serpents, and longer.... They fly through the air, which is darkened by the disgorging of their stench and venom ... This venom is so deadly that if a man should be touched by it or come nigh it, it would seem to him a burning fire, and would raise his skin in great blisters, as though he had been scalded." And the author adds: "The sea is swollen up by their venom."

Dragons have a crest, sharp talons, and a hissing throat, and are almost unconquerable. Albertus Magnus tells us, however, that magicians, when they wish to subdue them, beat as loudly as they can on drums, and that the dragon, imagining that it is the roll of thunder, which they greatly dread, let themselves be handled quietly and are taken.

The enemy of this winged reptile is the elephant, which sometimes succeeds in crushing it by falling on it with all its weight; but most times it is killed by the dragon, which feeds on its blood, of which the freshness allays the intolerable burning caused by its own venom.

Next to this monster comes the gryphon, a combination of the quadruped and the bird, for it has the body of the lion and the head and talons of the eagle. Then the basilisk, regarded as the king of serpents; it is four feet long, and has a tail as thick as a tree, and spotted with white. Its head bears a tuft in shape like a crown; it has a strident voice, and its eye is murderous, "A look," says the "Romance of Alexander," "so piercing, that it is pestilential and deadly to all beasts, whether venomous or no." Its breath is no less fetid, nor less dangerous, for, "by its breath are all things infected, and when it is dying it is fain to disgorge it; it stinks so that all other beasts flee from it."

Its most formidable foe is the weasel, which bites its throat, "though it be a beast no bigger than a rat," for "God hath made nothing without reason and remedy," the pious Mediaeval writer concludes.

Why the weasel? There is nothing to show; nor was this little creature, who did such good service, honoured by our forefathers as having a favourable meaning.

It is symbolical of dissimulation and depravity, and taken to typify the degrading life of the mountebank. It may also be remembered that this carnivorous beast, which was supposed to carry its young in the mouth and give birth to them through the ear, is numbered among the unclean animals in the Bible.

"This zoological homoeopathy is rather inconsistent," observed Durtal, "unless the similar interpretation given to these two creatures, hating each other, may signify that the Devil devours himself."

Next we have the phoenix, "a bird of very fine plumage resembling the peacock; it is very solitary, and feeds on the seeds of the ash;" its colour, moreover, is of purple overshot with gold; and because it is said to rise again from its ashes, it is always typical of the Resurrection of Christ.

The unicorn was one of the most amazing creatures in mystical natural history.

"It is a very cruel beast, with a great and thick body after the fashion of a horse; it hath for a weapon a great horn, half a fathom in length, so sharp and so hard that there is nothing it cannot pierce.... When men need to take it they bring a virgin maid to the place where they know that it has its abode. When the unicorn sees her and knows that she is a virgin, it lieth down to sleep in her lap, doing her no harm; then come the hunters and kill it.... Likewise, if she be not a pure maid the unicorn will not sleep, but killeth the damsel who is not pure."

Whence we conclude that the unicorn is one of the emblems of chastity, as also is another very strange beast of which Saint Isidor speaks: the porphyrion.

This has one foot like that of the partridge, and the other webbed like that of a goose, its peculiarity consists in mourning over adultery, and loving its master so faithfully that it dies of pity in his arms when it learns that his wife has deceived him. So that this species was soon extinct!

"There must be some more fabulous beasts to be included," murmured Durtal, again turning over his papers.

He found the wyvern, a sort of Melusina, half woman and half serpent; a very cruel beast, full of malice and devoid of pity, Saint Ambrose tells us; the manicoris, with the face of a man, the tawny eyes and crimson mane of a lion, a scorpion's tail, and the flight of an eagle; this sort is insatiable by human flesh. The leoncerote, offspring of the male hyena and the lioness, having the body of an ass, the legs of a deer, the breast of a wild beast, a camel's head, and armed with terrible fangs; the tharanda, which, according to Hugh of Saint Victor, has the shape of the ox, the profile of the stag, the fur of the bear, and which changes colour like the cameleon; finally, the sea-monk, the most puzzling of all, since Vincent of Beauvais describes it as having its body covered with scales, and it is furnished, in lieu of arms, with fins all over claws, besides having a monk's shaven head ending in the snout of a carp.

Others were also invented, as for instance the gargoyles, hybrid monsters, signifying the vomiting forth of sin ejected from the sanctuary; reminding the passer-by who sees them pouring forth the water from the gutter, that when seen outside the church, they are the voidance of the spirit, the cloaca of the soul!

"But," said Durtal to himself, "that seems to me enough of the matter. From the point of view of symbolism this menagerie is not particularly interesting since these monsters—the wyvern, the manicoris, the leoncerote, the tharanda and sea-monk—all mean the same thing, and all embody the Spirit of Evil."

He took out his watch.

"Come," said he, "I have still time enough before dinner to go through the list of real animals."

And he turned over his notes on birds.

"The cock," said he, "is prayer, watchfulness, the preacher, the Resurrection, since it is the first to wake at daybreak; the peacock, that has, as an old writer says, "the voice of a devil and the feathers of an angel," is a mass of contradictory symbols: it typifies pride, and, according to Saint Antony of Padua, immortality, as well as vigilance by reason of the eyes in its tail. The pelican is the image of contemplation and of charity; of love, too, according to Saint Madalene of Pazzi; the sparrow symbolizes penitential solitude; the swallow, sin; the swan, pride, according to Raban Maur; diligence and solicitude according to Thomas de Catimpre; the nightingale is mentioned by Saint Mechtildis as meaning the tender soul; and the same saint compares the lark to persons who do good works with cheerfulness; it is to be noted too that in the windows of Bourges the lark means charity to the sick.

"Here are others specified by Hugh of Saint Victor. To him the vulture means idleness; the kite, rapacity; the raven, detraction; the white owl, hypochondria; the common owl, ignorance; the magpie, chattering talk; and the hoopoe, sluttishness and evil report.

"This is all a sorry medley!" said Durtal, "and I fear it will be the same with the mammalia and other beasts!"

He compared a few passages. The ox, the lamb, the sheep, we have seen. The sheep is the type of timidity and meekness, and Saint Pacomius embodies in him the monk who lives punctual and obedient, and loving his brethren. Saint Melito on his part ascribes hypocrisy to the ostrich, temporal power to the rhinoceros, human frailty to the spider; we may also mention among the crustacea, the crab as symbolizing heresy and the synagogue, because it walks backwards and away from the path of righteousness. Among fish, the whale is the emblem of the tomb, just as Jonas, who came out of it after three days, is typical of Jesus risen from the dead. Among rodents the beaver is the image of Christian prudence, because, says the legend, when he is pursued by hunters he tears with his teeth the pouch containing castoreum and flings it at the foe. For this reason it is likewise the animal representative of the text in the Gospel which declares that a man must cut off the offending member which is an occasion of sin.